She was a sapphic, a homosexual, a woman who loved other women… and died for it.

In 2016, a rather well-known (at least to queer women who consume media) Autostraddle piece was first published. The piece was written in response to an incident that happened on the CW show The 100, but it will forever be immortalized as a pillar of queer exhaustion and utter sadness, particualrly for sapphics. The column, which functions more like a listicle, is dedicated to every “Dead Lesbian and Bisexual Characters On TV, And How They Died.” 

There’s a lot of backfilling in the piece, but the URL for the column lists the original starting number at 65. The Wayback Machines allows us to see specific days for the column, and how many deaths they were up to at different periods of time after it was published. On the earliest day, which I believe was it being published, it was updated twice. Neither of them were the 65 deaths stated in the URL. No, they were 118 and 124, because even when the piece was coming out - queer women couldn’t stop dying on television. Or, rather, people couldn’t stop killing them.

Which was, very clearly, the case when a rather infamous episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer aired on May 7th, over twenty years ago. Written by Steven S. DeKnight (who would later go on to showrun the first season of Marvel’s Daredevil for Netflix, among other things), it was the nineteenth episode of season six. And that episode, “Seeing Red,” has a reputation that precedes it for two major reasons. First, is that it’s the episode where Spike attempts to rape Buffy, which sends him away in search of his soul. The second, more relevant to the topic at hand, is that it’s the episode where Tara is killed. One of those, alone, would make the episode hard to watch - but both make it nearly unbearable to me, on a personal level. As I’m sure is true for many fans of the show. 

With the senseless death of Tara (because it’s truly a freak accident in the plot that she’s shot and killed at all), the episode is certainly one for the ages (in the most derogatory sense of the phrase possible). Willow and Tara were some of the only visible lesbians in the late 90s and early 00s on American television, and their relationship was up and down, dealing with addiction and abuse. Things which are particularly relatable to queer people, who tend to deal with both things in large numbers. And even on a show like Buffy, they hadn’t been allowed to kiss until season six, let alone have the same types of sexual exploits as their non-queer counterparts. But they were finally getting back together - finally getting to be happy. They were a revelation.

But it was also a revelation that we still existed (and exist) with Hays Code mentality baked into our media. No happy queers! Because even on a show like Buffy, where characters die all the time, there are really only two main characters who don’t get to come back, at some point: Joyce and Tara. In the episode that follows “Seeing Red,” Willow, in her grief, asks Osiris to bring Tara back - but since she was killed by the means of man, he cannot help her. And when Willow, in her rage, discovers that Warren is responsible, she begins her arc as the ending villain of the season. Her rage makes her monstrous, and I have a lot of mixed feelings about the whole thing.

Additionally, something I find really cruel (which is certainly a word I’d use to describe Joss Whedon and his approach to writing characters, particularly women) is that “Seeing Red” is the first time that Amber Benson, who played Tara, had a card in the opening credits. It was a longstanding wish of Whedon’s to be able to play into the shock of having an actor be in the opening credits (which is a highly negotiated position) and then have them die in that very episode. It’s even something he talked about wanting on the commentary for the first episode of the show. And… yeah. Cruel is absolutely the word, I think.

So, you have this… situation in the plot of your show. The villain of the moment goes to find the lead, to shoot and kill her. Meanwhile, two queer women are getting back together after a long time apart. After they’ve had sex and can see happiness in their future, the villain’s storyline finally catches up, and one of the queer women is killed in the crossfire. That’s the barebones of it, after all. And great. Okay. But what if the lead was actually the other queer woman? That very brave question was asked by Jason Rothenberg, who created The 100 for The CW. It’s a show that’s so messy, I can’t really get into all the ways in which it is, but the death of Lexa in the March 3rd episode “Thirteen” from 2016 is certainly the loudest.

The reaction to Lexa’s death was actually quite similar to the reaction to Tara’s death, fourteen years prior - and basically on the same network. Which is to say that sapphic fans were hurt and angry. The major difference between the two, however, was the existence of modern online culture. Buffy still existed in a sort of pre-internet, while The 100 was very rooted in social media and online fan interactions with the show. So, the fans who watched Lexa die, in a nearly identical way to Tara, were able to be loud about it in a way that Buffy fans simply didn’t have access to.

And boy was it a shitshow. In the aftermath of it, showrunner Jason Rothenberg was radio silent on Twitter, when he’d been very active prior to the backlash. Javier Grillo-Marxuach, who wrote the episode, on the other hand, talked about it actively - and still does! Like, he doesn’t like that he wrote it either! He appeared on a panel at the ATX Television Festival in June of 2016, a few months after the episode. Which was, because I’m me, a festival and a panel I went to. The panel was, very specifically, about Bury Your Gays - which is the name of the trope in question. Although, it’s also often used interchangeably with “Dead Lesbian Syndrome” because of how often the dead gays in question are sapphics, specifically - at least in the more modern era. 

That panel was… interesting? Yeah, that’s what I’m gonna go with. It was a mix of affirming from half of the panel participants, and dismissive from the other half. And that split kind of manifested itself in the conversation. Was it important to protect queer characters, simply because they were queer. Ultimately, it’s the debate we’ve been having for ages: should “queer” be a defining feature of a person? The answer for characters is the same for people, though. Which is: sometimes! It really depends on the person, their situation, and their direct relationship to their queer idenity.

I walked away from that panel really disappointed. Because it was proof that we’re in this terrible, circular argument. One that we’re doomed to be in forever. Which is when, of course, real life tragedy happened. It’s darkly ironic because a big part of the conversation at the panel was about if media depictions matter, ultimately. Like, if you should take into account harmful effects of tropes like Bury Your Gays when trying to tell a story. (And I would argue that if you don’t think media matters, or if you think you’re making media in a sterile vacuum… then maybe you should not be making it?)

Anyway, it was June of 2016 and the Bury Your Gays panel was on June 12th, only a few hours before the Pulse Nightclub Shooting in Orlando, where 49 people were killed in a very targeted, hatefilled attack on a gay nightclub. In a parallel universe, the panel was on Sunday and the conversation was vastly different. 

But it wasn’t. Instead, for every lesbian in a bullet proof vest (thank you Emily Andres, I’ll always love you for that one), we got another violent and brutal murder. The entry in the Autostraddle piece right before the season one finale of Wynonna Earp, with the bullet proof vest in question, was Poussey in Orange is the New Black - a death so violent and cruel that I cannot even fathom its purpose. 

The dark irony is that at the beginning of March there were a few pieces on the internet about whether television had “learned its lesson” since the Lexa incident. The answer came with a resounding “no” when the finale for Killing Eve aired around mid-April. Brief queer happiness followed quickly by death (I think the onscreen time between kiss and death is even shorter than on The 100). Somehow it’s a tried and true formula, even though it was a departure from the source material, where the two women fath their deaths and live together quite happily. 

The Autostraddle piece, which is only for lead and recurring characters, is currently at 225 and the last two entries, alone, are from Killing Eve. So, killing off a sapphic character to buck the “status quo” isn’t quite the groundbreaking writing move everybody seems to think it is. Instead, it’s just exhausting!